A Monumental Challenge

I have to say, I really walked into it this past weekend. I was out at the (formerly abandoned) B’nai Israel Cemetery in West Philly (see links at end), photographing the headstones as part of a research project, when I was invited to the takedown of the broken Keystone monument at nearby (also formerly abandoned) Mount Moriah Cemetery.  Donna, along with her husband, who both take care of B’nai Israel and as much of Mount Moriah as they can handle, had organized a rigging crew to remove the broken spire from atop the large Masonic Keystone monument. Hurricane Sandy toppled the spire a few weeks back so the only thing holding it up above the roadway was a tangle of vines.

Keystone monument with toppled spire

You can see the broken piece in this photo I took a couple weeks prior to this visit. At right is what the spire looked like a few years ago. I was invited to take pictures of the disassembly, but it was obvious they really needed another pair of hands. As I walked the short distance into Mount Moriah (B’nai Israel is essentially on the same piece of land), I saw that a scaffold had already been built around the monument. I would estimate the base of the broken spire to have been about twenty feet off the ground, the spire itself adding another six feet.

It was mid-afternoon when I got there, and nightfall when I left. Over the course of about three hours, we managed to get the 500-pound marble spire down to the ground in one piece, to await its reattachment at some point in the future. About eight people were involved in the project, though one lead guy provided most of the brainpower and muscle.

Sawing the marble spire loose from the steel rebar

The spire was actually attached to the main structure of the monument with steel rebar, a rod that went through the center of the spire, and continued down into the arch of the monument. The rebar had bent and pulled out of the spire somewhat when the spire fell, but was still attached to the inside of the spire. To get the spire down, the rebar had to be cut.

That’s where the generator and electric Sawzall® came into play. Three guys set all this up and the lead guy up on the scaffold spent twenty minutes sawing through the steel. When it finally broke loose, the spire looked quite precarious hanging up there with ropes and nylon straps. How to get it down? The old green coffin-lowering straps had no winching mechanism so another fellow provided some pulleys and rope. Hopefully things could be rigged up so we could ease the spire down to the ground.

Marble miter from atop monument

The marble miter, or flame, was actually loose on the rebar protruding from the top of the spire. This just slid off and was gently lowered to the ground in a padded moving blanket. I set the twenty-pound decoration in the nearby weeds out of harm’s way.

Spire cut loose from steel rebar

At one point, there were as many as three men on the upper deck of the scaffold, balancing the spire in mid-air, attempting to lower it down to the next level. Did I mention that it was slowly getting dark? And that one of the men had only one arm? I was holding onto the pulley rope from the ground, adding some upward force to the hanging spire, while they guided it through the center gap in the platform. Some other folks were keeping the generator running and connecting lights. My wife called my cell phone at this point wondering where I was. I told her I was helping disassemble a broken marble monument in an old cemetery at night – that’s plausible, right?

Spire being lowered thru decking

Nothing short of amazing to me was the fact that this group of guys kept their cool even when things began to look impossible. When lowering the spire all the way to the ground began to look unlikely, they ended up propping one of the 2x10 planks against the box of the pickup truck so we could gradually slide the spire into the back of the truck!

I was surprised to find out later that these guys were not a professional rigging crew, but just regular people who happened to have way more common sense and practical know-how than you could possibly imagine! And they had the right tools. Why were they here? Maybe the same reason I was there. Just to have the honor of doing something good.

Fund-raising will be put into place in the near future to reattach the spire, through the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery. This would obviously involve a crane and people skilled in statuary restoration.

Spire safely in truck bed

Further Reading:
West Philadelphia's B'nai Israel Cemetery

Wintering at Philadelphia's Mt. Moriah Cemetery

I sit in the heated sidewalk enclosure of Tony Luke’s cheese steak shop in deep South Philly, eating what may be the second best breakfast sandwich I ever had. (The first one by the way, also came from Tony Luke’s.) I’m watching the UPS trucks and car haulers take off for their morning runs as I sit inside the warm seating area.

St. Alban's Court

Cold outside, this early winter day, and supposed to get colder and windy. Perfect for an abandoned cemetery run – a hike through the wilderness that is Mount Moriah Cemetery. I pick up my friend Bob, who appropriately lives on St. Alban’s Court in West Philadelphia, where they filmed the movie, The Sixth Sense. Together we’re off to see dead things.

We park at the cemetery’s Cobb’s Creek Parkway entrance, which has been barricaded with concrete highway dividers. Before we begin our exploration around the abandoned mausoleums, I weapon up and load my cameras. This is only Bob’s second time here, so he’s not fully aware of all the things of which to be afraid. I had been told that the city pound confiscated all the wild dogs, but I took my iron ice hook just in case.

Mausoleum Ridge, Mt. Moriah in winter

Summer view of Mausoleum Ridge

As we clambered around inside the circle of mausoleums, I was surprised to see things I’d never seen here before. It’s almost as though the foliage has died a fuller death than usual − in summer, you can hardly see anything for the wildly overgrown bushes and trees, vines and pickers. The pickers and vicious thornage are REALLY what keep you from accessing any of the quaint old headstones and even the grand memorials.

It’s still a wilderness here, even though the city and volunteers spent the entire summer cleaning up portions of the place. Most of the effort had been spent on the Kingsessing Avenue side of Mt. Moriah, with its hundreds of relatively new Muslim graves and its tumble-down gatehouse. So I was surprised to see an entire section (above, Sect. 127, perhaps – see map) on the Cobb’s Creek side cleared of brush and looking the way a cemetery SHOULD look. Not only that, but we found a beautifully cared for family plot nearby, trimmed nicely with Christmas decorations at the top of the hill. This, in the midst of thousands of other graves covered with dead weeds and fallen trees.

As we make our way through the dense underbrush toward the giant rusting hulk of an iron memorial fountain, Bob tells me about growing up in a house surrounded by nine cemeteries. He’s comfortable around (and in) them, but his friends were afraid to go to his house. He’s also used to the dangers of abandoned cemeteries, as he has researched, explored, and photographed many of them in Edinburgh, Scotland. Apparently, many Scottish cemeteries are in the same deplorable condition as Mt. Moriah.

Climbing out of the tangles of vines and dead trees, we entered a clearing, and heard the dogs. Then we saw them. A small pack – three maybe. I tried to photograph them, but when I put the camera up to my eye, they darted into the high dead thicket. The barking continues as vehemently as ever. We head off in the opposite direction and talk about how stun guns and mace are illegal to buy or carry in the city of Philadelphia (though you can buy them in neighboring counties).

Winter is strange here at Mt. Moriah, with all the foliage gone – it’s almost as though you’re looking at the skeletal remains of the cemetery itself. There are hundreds of acres of dense woods shrouding massive marble and granite monuments, but the dirt roads are now walkable after the summer’s big clean-up. These roads weren’t made for giant garbage trucks, however, so the granite coping around some family plots has been scraped and broken. At least one tall granite monument is knocked over. The price of progress – at least all the piles of trash, building materials, and old tires are gone. (Just so you know, it wasn’t the barricades that stopped the illegal dumping – it actually stopped BEFORE the city locked the place down. All thanks to the zeal of one nearby resident who shall remain nameless).

People look at my photos and assume the cemetery is out in the boonies somewhere. Well no, I say, its in a densely populated, yet run down area of Southwest Philadelphia. Its size is estimated to be between 300 and 400 acres – most of which is an overgrown wilderness. A forest filled with all the grandeur of a Victorian cemetery, from the lowliest sweetly sleeping tombstone to massively ornate marble and granite monuments erected for the purpose of remembering God knows who, at this point. Bob points out that with all the negative publicity Mt. Moriah has achieved, those buried here are now remembered for a completely different reason.

Pet carrier, headstones in background

This is only Bob’s second visit to Mt. Moriah. I’ve been here so many times that nothing seems to surprise me. The more you learn about a thing, the less you pay attention, I suppose. For instance, the pet carrier we walked past. I though nothing of it, just Mount Moriah weirdness. Bob, however, deduced that someone had let their small animal loose in the wild, to fend for itself or get eaten by a coyote. He must have a sixth sense about such things. I thought of the small lame dog I saw here once, dragging itself through the weeds. But why leave the carrier here, with the door open? Because the person didn’t want to be seen leaving with an empty animal carrier. Ah.

We spend a few hours first on the Cobb’s Creek side, then make our way over to the Kingsessing Avenue side. I’ve been here so many times I’ve lost my early, wide-eyed reaction to this overgrown wrecked hull of a cemetery.  Still, I’m surprised at the piles of deer droppings here and there. You’d think with the dense woods, this place would be lousy with deer, but I’ve never seen one.

Most of the picker bushes at Mt. Moriah are dead for the season. Those that survive, however, can tear through armor. They are the worst here in the Circle of St. John as we try to navigate around the central marble monument to the Masonic Grand Tyler. It‘s shocking that someone went to the trouble to get all the way in here just to spray paint the monuments. It does seem to be a popular destination – empty beer cans abound and I find a burned American flag on the ground.

We talk about how to restore this place, on a piecemeal basis. When you think hundreds of acres of overgrown woodland, it does seem rather impossible. The place looks more like an improbable act of will than a result of simple neglect. So why aren’t movies being filmed in here? Certainly it would be very difficult to build something like this as a Hollywood movie set. Maybe film producers would think the viewing public would never believe such a place could exist. Why did Philadelphia allow this to happen to an historic landmark? Whatwould the Eiffel Tower look like today if it were in Philadelphia instead of Paris?

More dogs circle us. Great – we’ve got them on both sides. (Why is it that wild animals never attack people you WANT them to attack?) I kind of wanted to move further back to where dense trees hid some quite ornate dynasty plots, but Bob indicated that there were more dogs coming from that direction. I fondle the hook in my large coat pocket, enjoying the menacing power it gives me whenever I touch it. Then it occurs to me that one hook might not be adequate protection if TWO of us are attacked by several dogs. I blithely asked him what he would rather do. He said, we should probably head in the direction of the gatehouse (away from the dogs). I said, well, yeah, that would be the sensible thing to do, but what do you want to do? He was a bit uncomfortable with the proposition so we moved out of harm’s way.

I had this notion of an action hero called “The Hook,” who sits down with Bob at this point and says, “Now listen – this is CEMETERY photography we’re about here,” as our hero, without turning, takes a mighty swipe at a vicious dog leaping through the air toward them. The hook connects, the dog cries and runs off.

We walked toward the back of the crumbling gatehouse, really nothing more than a façade of crumbling brownstone, at this point; the clinging vines actually holding what’s left of the structure together. I spent a few minutes photographing the statue of Father Time behind it while Bob investigated the ruins of the gatehouse. “Looks like they’ve cleaned this place up a bit,” he said, noting the absence of broken tombstones, piles of old tires, and assorted garbage.

A few minutes later he came walking toward me and I asked him if he wanted to go around to photograph the front of the gatehouse. He said, “I don’t think so − someone has taken up residence in there.” Yikes. Bet that guy hasn’t had a Tony Luke’s breakfast sandwich in a while. So we headed off back in the direction of my car, a good twenty-minute walk across the cemetery. The weather turned windy and colder as I thought about Philadelphia’s upcoming Homicide Parade, meant to lament the city’s Big 300 murder rate for 2011. Yay.

Gatehouse at Kingsessing Ave., Mt. Moriah Cemetery

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Bob Reinhardt, Tom Bera, and Donna for their inspiration in helping me write this article.

Weeds

Mount Moriah Cemetery in West Philadelphia is probably the largest (somewhat) abandoned cemetery in this area.  Although the grass does get cut on a regular basis, there appears to be no trust fund money to keep the majority of damage at bay, e.g. the mausoleum graffiti you see here.

I'd visited the cemetery (which is bisected by the Cobbs Creek Parkway) many times over the past decade. It's one of the first experiences I had seeing black urban cowboys. I was playing my guitar sitting on the steps of a blocked-up mausoleum and I heard the clip-clop of hooves! Imagine my surprise when five guys on horseback, decked out in cowboy outfits, trotted past me! Its one of those things you experience that you, um, don't tell anyone about until you've verified that it wasn't a hallucination or otherworldly experience. Click here for proof of their existence: Urban Cowboys!

Mt. Moriah is one of the few cemeteries in the Philadelphia area that is not gated and locked at night. Therefore, certain things may happen there that don't happen in a guarded, locked cemetery. One such thing, my friend Krista and I discovered back around 2002. At that time, the cemetery was much more overgrown than it is now (volunteers have cut down a lot of the trees growing out of tombstones and continue to cut back the high weeds--by the way, if you get benefit from visiting cemeteries for any reason, consider stopping by the office and donating some money to help with their upkeep!).

Krista and I were making our way through the five-foot high weeds to the back of the cemetery to see if there were any monuments worth photographing, when we came upon a perfectly manicured clearing about 12x12 feet in size. This was the home of rows and rows of well-kept and cultivated marijuana plants! People can be so creative....